According to Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life, Oxf: Clarendon P (1987), p 105: [In 1894] "Symons wrote a series of four poems [but five are in his Collected Works] with the title 'Intermezzo: Venetian Nights', which depicts the speaker's romantic and Coleridgean loneliness amidst the masts, nights, and water desolation." In "I. Veneta Marina" are masts in "the night of the sky" reflected in "the water's night," and "I too . . . / Alone with the night again, / And the water's monotone; / I and the night alone." In "II. Serata di Festa" the poet wanders "loveless and alone"; and the last stanza is quoted by Beckson: "I am a shipwrecked sailor, lost / For lack of water on the sea: / Water, but none for me; / Water, but I, thirsting and fever-tossed, / In much abundance lost." Coleridgean are the echoes of The RAM.

Four lines, 14 words, with play on the phrase "recollect your emotions in tranquility" and the name "words worth."

In the Locklin Collection, Special Collections Department, CSULB Library.

1 9 7 ?

[S II.3 197?] LEVIS, Larry. "Slow Child with a Book of Birds." Date not known at this writing.

Quoted and commented on by Eric Gudas in Poetry Flash: A Poetry Review & Literary Calendar for the West (No. 290, Ja-Mar 2003, pp 1-8), in an omnibus review of three collections of the poetry of Levis: The Selected Levis, ed David St John (U of Pittsburgh P, 2000); The Selected Levis, Revised Edition, including twelve poems from Elegy, ed David St John (U of Pittsburgh P, Ja 2003); The Gazer Within, ed James Marshal et al. (Poets on Poetry: U of Michigan P, 2001).

"In ‘Slow Child with a Book of Birds,' Coleridge is summoned as a touchstone for Levis's forthright and almost tender vision---characterized indeed by a fundamental ‘tact & decency'---of brutality:

"Below is a facetious query to which you are to give a serious answer: . . . .

"Wordsworth, as far as is known, had only one fling, / The Annette Vallon thing. / . . . . / Coleridge, who could walk a hundred miles without a blister / Cared less for his wife than for Wordsworth's sister. / . . . . / The answer to which is not as easy as pie; / Which Romantic was the most romantic, / And why? / (with apologies to Richard Armour)."

Three stanzas, 17 lines. Concludes: "Coleridge, now your fingers are sand and bone. / So must I be and my young son. / Though now our love's full of bones like fish, / it too must yield, be yanked from life. / Still pilgrims come to your headstone quiet, / honor what rests in weedy places, living art."

In the Locklin Collection, Special Collections Department, CSULB Library.

Thirteen years in the making, the poem evolved from an elegy for poet James Wright who died in 1980 to a poem "for a generic poète maudit of our generation" under the persona "William Trout." From the poem: "I remember / Bill depressed, drinking double Manhattans straight up, taunting himself: 'Compassion's flack! Elmer Gantry or Guggenheim grief!' In C's Notebooks, he underlined: 'Poetry--excites us to artificial feelings--callous to real ones'" (p 67).

Poem's epigraph: "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / --Coleridge, 'Kubla Khan'." Its two verse paragraphs of mostly tetrameter lines (26, 12) adapt some of the structure and use or adapt lines and images from KK. The final lines: "For life on honey-dew doth feed, / a pleasure-dome beyond compare, / a fantasy more dear than dream, / drunk on the milk of Paradise!"

Anthology contains 36 hitherto unpublished fantasy short stories and poems. First half of editor's introduction, "Xanadu and Porlock, Too" (pp 11-12) develops the interruption theme, with references to Stevie Smith's poem on the subject (1966--C8230) and to Norman Mailer and Frank Herbert.

This poem, prompted by C's notebooks, etc, is an imaginative handling of C's thought and style written in The RAM format with text and gloss. Organized into twelve parts headed by names of months from June through May, the poem is written in the first person as if representing C's stream of consciousness. It often uses abbreviated word-forms and is sans punctuation and most capitalization except for breaks indicated by a virgule (/). The gloss is written in the third person in standard prose. Here is a text sample, line breaks marked by |: "July | no stool/ sense of weight | at scrobiculus cordis/ | a month since my last entry | & failure to embark | on the embayed work | I've steered in nubibus | as no more than untranscribed | notions: 'the Origin of | Evil an epic poem'/ leaves | upturned as the twilight wind | plays at th head of a young | poplar/ pen immobile in | th darkness wch sticks down | all thru wch so much moved/....."

i was swimming at the y the other day and feeling more tranquil with each passing lap, when suddenly it came to me why coleridge turned into a drug addict and wordsworth didn't: (lines 1-5)

[W "was always climbing . . . or hiking."] . . . now coleridge, of course, tagged along on a few of these forays, but you get the feeling that his heart was not truly in the highlands but in the libraries. his idea of a great workout was to match his considerable grey matter against the intricacies of german philosophy. . . . you can see why he ended up in dejection and on opiates. (lines 15-22, 24-5) //

fortunately, he had a wise physician who prolonged his life and intellectual labors with miniature doses of their day's equivalent of methadone. clearly america could use a guy like that as surgeon general. . . . for the time being i would continue to recommend the natural morphine produced by swimming. (lines 26-31, 33-35)

Headnote by Richard Holmes refers to "the initials STC carved at the very back of the cave." Pixies' Parlor near the River Otter, which "suddenly seemed to me like a symbol of the essentially cumulative process of biography itself."

Poem in 22 three-line unrhymed , interwoven stanzas using "the techniques of verbal collage and improvisation" [says the CB editor]. In each stanza the lines begin with C's initials. Concluding stanzas: